Ars on your lunch break: The toxic truths within our DNA

Enlarge / Don’t you know that your DNA is toxic? (credit: Jive Records)

Today we present the second installment of my interview with medical geneticist Robert Green about the promises and pitfalls that could lie in reading out your full genome. Part one ran yesterday—so if you missed it, click right here. Otherwise, you can press play on the embedded player or pull up the transcript—both of which are below.

In this installment, we discuss why some medical researchers view personal genetic information as a literal toxin. This isn’t strictly out of paternalism (although there are elements of that). A tiny fraction of people might indeed make discoveries that are both horrible and unactionable. A larger fraction could suffer anguish from the sheer ambiguity of what’s divulged. After carefully studying both the psychology and consequences of these situations, Robert is fully convinced that personal genetic information should be made available to any adult who seeks it after being soundly apprised of the ramifications.

We next discuss rare genetic diseases and how incongruously common they are. Robert’s groundbreaking research recently revealed that as much as a fifth of us are recessive carriers of some exotic genetic horror or other. Which brings us to the important notion of partial “penetrance,” or diseases that can slightly (and often mysteriously) manifest in a recessive carrier. High school biology trains us to think of recessive/dominant and afflicted/unafflicted in very binary terms. In reality, there are many gradations between the poles.